As is known in the art, homeland security, urban operations and intelligence applications all have a need for technology which allows the searching of large amounts of information. After subway bombings in London England occurred in 2005, for example, there was a need to review hours of video from several thousand surveillance cameras. This was a relatively difficult task made even more difficult and tedious because it had to be done manually. In order to ease the burden of such a task, there is an effort underway with Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) “Multimedia Content Description Interface” standard (MPEG-7) to tag scenes of video with metadata.
In today's world where the asymmetric warfare threat is real (i.e. the enemy adjusts its tactics to neutralize intrusion detection systems), video surveillance is a key asset. These video surveillance systems however, generate large amounts of video that need to be monitored and searched for an event or person of interest. There are new multi media standards, such as MPEG-7 which provide the needed functionality to transmit objects and metadata. Thus, one challenge will be to analyze large streams and stored data for information (e.g. incidents) of interest.
So-called “Homeland Defense” and “Homeland Security” solutions will require knowledge-assisted content analysis and annotation in order to mitigate new threats and challenges posed in net-centric warfare. State of the art intelligent video systems today use digital signal processor (DSP) chipsets with proprietary software in order to detect objects and associate alarms with predefined events. While such an approach is acceptable, its intended use is as an alarm situation for abnormal object detection in a command room scenario. It does not facilitate real correlation or forensic examination of a scene or set of scenes.